The lack of outrage about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act led to Trump – and Dobbs

Best-selling historian Carol Anderson explains how voting rights are inseparable from reproductive rights.

Two Supreme Court decisions issued almost exactly nine years apart help explain both how American democracy became so imperiled, and how we can save it.

On June 25, 2013, a 5-4 decision authored by John Roberts invalidated the formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act making it impossible to enforce Section 5 of the law. The mechanism in Section 5 had been the single most effective effort to maintain the gains of the Civil Rights Era by forcing jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to have all changes in their voting system approved in advance. Texas immediately passed a racist voter ID laws that had been put on hold under Section 5.

Activists raged. 

But the general public generally had no response to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which had protected what Ronald Reagan called “the crown jewel of American liberties.” Unless you call the lowest turnout in 70 years in next year’s midterm elections a response.

Republicans rode that record-low turnout and Ebola, an epidemic which resulted resulted in zero deaths from cases contracted in America, to control of the Senate, which led to Mitch McConnell holding Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat open to be decided by the 2016 election.

You can blame Trump’s “victory” that November, which led to the Dobbs decision issued on June 24th 2022, on a lot of things. And you’d be right. 

At the top of the list you could put Jim Comey, Vladimir Putin, and an illegal hush money scheme that silenced two of the women Donald Trump had an affair with while his third wife was taking care of his newborn son. All true.

But best-selling historian Carol Anderson refuses to let you blame Black voters whose turnout dropped by 7 percent because they allegedly didn’t like Hillary Clinton. 

In the latest episode of “How are you feeling about democracy?” which you can listen to above or in a bunch of other places, Professor Anderson told me:

In that one sentence you had basically the racism and the misogyny linked together. So Trump was Black folks fault because Black folks just didn't show up. 

But that was the first presidential election in 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. And so Black voter turnout went down by 7 percent. And to chalk that up to just, "They couldn't stand Hillary, and not that you had states that were now requiring really strict voter IDs, and the way that they were requiring these voter IDs was to figure out who had what types of IDs and then to write the law to privilege the kinds that whites disproportionately had. It was a way that they shut down early voting sites. It was the way that they shut down early voting days, the times when people could vote early. None of that went into that calculation of what could cause a 7 percent drop.

That 7 percent drop was made possible not only by both the gutting of the VRA but also by the lack of a backlash to this assault on the freedom of the Americans who bled for their right to participate in our democracy, Anderson explained:

With the overturning of Roe, you had this massive outcry. You had a massive realization that what you had here was the stripping of basic rights from women, the basic rights to control your own body. And rightfully so. But you didn't get that same kind of outcry with the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder. Instead, it felt more kind of like, "Oh, that's just politics. Oh, that's just business as usual." And no, it's not. 

Eviscerating the basic rights of American citizens to be able to access the ballot box is not something we need to be just, "Oh, that's just politics as usual." We have to understand what it really is.

The loss of voting rights led almost directly to the loss of reproductive rights. And until these two noble causes are entwined, neither will ever be safe.

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